‘Mozart’s music sounded odd when he first wrote it’

With just a soldering iron and a pair of pliers, synthesiser pioneer Bob Moog changed pop. So why did he spend his life penniless?

SWITCHED ON by Albert Glinsky 480pp, OUP, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £25, ebook £21.66 ÌÌÌÌÌ

When Bob Moog – geek, garage tinkerer, electronic music pioneer – drove to a trade show in his native New York in 1964 with a prototype of an early synthesiser in a black box strapped to the roof of his car, passing motorists assumed it was a coffin. Moog, showing the kind of mischievous eccentricity that peppered his career, would catch the spooked driver’s eye before gesturing upwards. “Mother,” he would mouth.

Transportation hiccups were a feature of the early history of the Moog, the eponymous synthesiser brand that would go on to transform popular and classical music. When Beatle George Harrison bought one in 1969, a Moog employee had to play the space-age contraption to British customs officials to prove it was an electronic organ and therefore exempt from a 70 per cent import tariff. When Mick Jagger acquired one, customs officers spent three hours searching the odd-shaped cargo for drugs.

With its nearly infinite palette of original sounds and its ability to mimic entire orchestras, the instrument caught the countercultural zeitgeist of the late 1960s. The Byrds, the Doors and the Monkees were early adopters, while a 1968 album of Bach music played solely on a Moog topped the US classical chart for three years. Within four months of Harrison’s Moog arriving in the UK, the Beatles used it on four tracks on Abbey Road (although Jagger got his first). Prog rockers

Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) and Yes went on to make banks of keyboards – including multiple Moogs – their calling card. The Vietnam film Apocalypse Now was soundtracked by a Moog, the otherworldly soundscapes “at least as important as the film” itself, as director Francis Ford Coppola writes in the foreword to Switched On, Albert Glinsky’s absorbing new biography of Bob Moog.

Switched On is an important musical history, but it is also a fable about how not to do business. Despite his apparent success, Moog was almost broke all his professional life. It is a tale about mindsets, specifically about how nerdy geniuses can be blind to glaringly obvious conventions (Moogs weren’t sold with user manuals, for example). It’s about how the fear of new technology creates existential dread. And it’s about how Western hubris let low-cost Japanese electronics sweep the world in the 1980s, crushing US competition in the process.

Robert Arthur Moog was born in New York in the Great Depression. He grew up in Flushing, Queens, within spitting distance of 1939’s New York World’s Fair, with its modernist structures and futuristic gizmos. When he wasn’t playing the piano, he’d tinker with old radio circuitry with his father, George. While still at school, Moog built a homemade organ called a Moogatron. Usual teen pursuits didn’t get a look-in. “Living at home, and still not dating, Bob spent his evenings with his father in the basement working on electronics,” his biographer writes.

The pair started manufacturing theremins, antennaed instruments that made sounds via hand gestures. In 1954 they made a $300 loss on

sales of $6,750, so expensive were the contraptions to produce. It would be the story of Bob’s life. He went it alone, and released mailorder theremin kits.

Avant-garde composers were experimenting with electronic music, but mainstream consumers still shunned these sounds, which Moog blamed on “cultural inertia”. Even Mozart’s music sounded odd when first written, he argued. Keen to help electronic composers, Moog invented a vast modular synthesiser, powered on stage by two car batteries. Profits remained scarce and a bid to make easy money by manufacturing cheap portable amplifiers backfired. Moog likened his career to “slipping backwards on a banana peel”. Now married, his long-suffering wife Shirleigh acted as bookkeeper, housekeeper and mother to a growing brood of children.

Recognition eluded Moog, even after he designed a theremin for the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds tour of 1966. He was about to give up when he exhibited his latest synth in Los Angeles in 1967. The trade convention coincided with the Summer of Love and the explosion of New Age “head music”. Far-out sounds were suddenly in, although Moog had barely heard of the Grateful Dead or the Beatles. The first commercial recording to feature a Moog was an LSD-influenced instrumental album called The Zodiac – Cosmic Sounds. A Moog stand at the Monterey International Pop Festival, also in 1967, caught the eye of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn and the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz. Moog was, finally, hot property.

Not everyone was thrilled. Vladimir Ussachevsky, the pioneering electronic composer, harrumphed that commercial synthesisers let average musicians “pass the most elementary exercises off as compositions”. The late John Peel summed up an ELP concert as “a tragic waste of time, talent and electricity”. Panicked unions feared synths would steal traditional musicians’ livelihoods. The Associated Federation of Musicians’ LA branch proposed that a studio synth player should be paid the combined fees of every musician that they had replaced, thereby making synths prohibitively expensive to use. It didn’t work.

More models followed, including

Mick Jagger’s Moog spent three hours in customs being searched for drugs

the portable Minimoog in 1970. Stevie Wonder became a convert, and Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder took disco mainstream with a Moog on 1977’s I Feel Love. But competition crept in and Bob had foolishly, perhaps arrogantly, only taken out one patent (a “ladder filter”, which rivals stole anyway). In 1982 alone, the Japanese company Yamaha sold 150,000 units of its DX7 synth, compared with the 12,000 Minimoogs that it took a decade to produce and sell on Bob’s homespun production line.

The instrument that John Lennon had compared to a robot eventually came to seem antiquated. Bob (who divorced Shirleigh and remarried) died of a brain tumour in 2005, his company having effectively disappeared before he reclaimed its name years later. By this point, the Moog had undergone a retro revival, with the likes of Air, the Chemical Brothers and the Beastie Boys using it to great effect.

Switched On will strike many chords with anyone interested in music. However, at more than 400 pages, it is too long. It took Glinsky 12 years to write, and at times it’s as intricate as one of Moog’s own contraptions. Still, it’s a towering tribute to the hobbyist who proved that to change the history of music, “all you need is a work bench, a soldering iron and a pair of pliers”. Switch on, tune in, and find out.

For a young, brilliant mathematician, Alicia certainly sounds uncannily like an old male American novelist riffing on some favourite themes and in a familiar style: “It’s just that I’m naïve enough to keep imagining that it’s possible to launch these sorties on a vector not wrenched totally implausible by cant.” What’s new and potentially interesting is the maths chat – stuff about Euler and topology, etc. But it’s difficult to tell if any of it is particularly insightful. Of the French mathematician Léon Motchane, for example, we are told that “He led the Bourbaki group but in the end they couldn’t follow him. Or wouldn’t. Their mathematics was grounded in set theory – which was

beginning to look more and more porous – and he’d moved a good bit beyond that.” A lot of names get thrown around – Gauss, Hilbert, Turing – but there’s no serious exploration of ideas. “I spent a certain amount of time on game theory. There’s something about it.” Yes. There is something about it. But what?

In addition to the maths, Alicia and her therapist talk about memory: “One of the problems is that each memory is the memory of the memory before.” And quantum mechanics: “Some physicists believe that the theory must eventually arrive at the understanding that the universe itself is a quantum phenomenon.” Genetics and

heritability: “Darwin’s question remains unanswered. How do we come by mental abilities that have no history?”

There’s a bit of dream analysis. And some odd remarks about Jews: “Jews represent two per cent of the population and 80 per cent of the mathematicians. If those numbers were even a little more skewed we’d be talking about a separate species.” Oh, and then of course there’s some discussion of the imaginary people, the hallucinations that plague Alicia, the principal figure being “a bald dwarf ” called “the Kid”. There might well be something interesting here that McCarthy is trying to say about the relationship between imagining people and writing fiction – but it turns out that Alicia had a halfbrother who died of polio when he was four, so maybe not.

By far the most profound and moving lines come at the very end of the book, which indicate perhaps what McCarthy is doing here:

He is the high priest of doom and gloom, so don’t come for an uplift

I think our time is up.

I know. Hold my hand.

Hold your hand?

Yes. I want you to.

All right. Why?

Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.

Is it a novel? I don’t know. Read it, anyway. Hold his hand.